Varela: They want to pave a farm and call it redevelopment. Governor Sherrill should say no

OPINION

On June 18, the New Jersey Highlands Council approved an application that designates roughly forty acres of actively farmed land in Lopatcong Township as a “redevelopment area,” clearing the way for an enormous warehouse the size of roughly sixteen football fields under one roof. There is nothing to redevelop on that land. It is a working farm. It grows food. Under any honest reading of the Highlands Act, it cannot be touched. Governor Mikie Sherrill has the authority to veto that approval, and she has only days left to do it.

So how did farmland get cleared for the bulldozer? Through a definition. The Highlands Act allows redevelopment only where a site is a designated brownfield or where at least seventy percent of it is already paved over. That threshold exists to keep redevelopment focused on land that is already developed, blighted, or abandoned, so that we stop paving over the open space we have left. The farm in Lopatcong comes nowhere close to seventy percent pavement, because it is a farm. So the applicants treated it as part of one combined “site” along with two heavily paved former Phillipsburg Mall properties, and counted the mall’s asphalt toward the farm’s total. Averaged together, the numbers cross seventy percent. The farmland qualifies as “redevelopment” only by borrowing pavement that sits on entirely separate parcels, and the prize for that paperwork is the destruction of preserved land.

The warehouse itself is not even the worst of it. The real danger is the loophole this approval creates. If a developer can take heavily paved land and use its pavement to reclassify the farmland next door as “redevelopment,” then every farm, forest, and open field near a strip mall or an old industrial site in the Highlands becomes a target. Convert one parcel, then use that new pavement to justify converting the next, and the next after that. Piece by piece, the Highlands Region, 1,343 square miles that supply drinking water to more than five million people, could be chipped away until the law that has protected it for over twenty years means nothing.

The people sounding this alarm are leaders in this space. Dante DiPirro, the attorney who helped write the Highlands Act and served as the first executive director of the Highlands Council, has laid out the legal grounds for a veto in a formal letter to the Governor’s office. Jeff Tittel, the longtime former director of the New Jersey Sierra Club, has called the vote a betrayal. And the legal case is not subtle. The statute refers to “a site,” singular. Nothing in it allows unrelated properties to be bundled together until the math works. When a state agency stretches clear statutory language to reach a predetermined result, the law gives the Governor a remedy, and that remedy is the veto.

This also squares with what the Governor has already promised the public. Mikie Sherrill campaigned on curbing warehouse sprawl and steering development toward existing industrial corridors rather than onto farmland in the Highlands Preservation Area. Vetoing these minutes would be that promise in action. New Jersey already has more than a billion square feet of warehouse space, so we are in no danger of running out of places to put boxes. What we are running short of is clean water, working farms, and the open land that makes this state worth living in. And nobody approving a speculative warehouse built on spec can tell you what will actually fill it, whether that turns out to be a distribution hub, an AI data center guzzling water and power, or something else entirely.

There is a fairness argument here too, and it should reach people on both sides of the aisle. For two decades, ordinary Highlands landowners have lived under tight restrictions. They accepted lower property values and gave up opportunities so the rest of us could drink clean water. They played by the rules. Now, politically connected developers are seeking a special exemption that those families never got. Rules that bind regular people but bend for the well-connected stop being rules at all. Vetoing this approval keeps the same standard in place for everyone.

The ground itself raises the stakes. This is karst limestone country that floods and sinkholes, as anyone who watched the I-80 closures and the Phillipsburg sinkhole disaster knows. The stream running off that site is a protected Category One trout production waterway feeding the Lopatcong Creek on its way to the Delaware River. Pouring hundreds of thousands of square feet of new impervious surface onto fragile, water-recharging ground in the middle of a drought puts a working farm, the water supply of millions, and the stability of the ground beneath it all at risk.

The clock is running. The Governor has until early July to veto these minutes, and once that window closes, the door stays open for good.

Governor Sherrill, the authority is yours. The legal grounds were handed to you by the very people who built this law, and the commitment is one you made to the voters who believed you. Veto this approval. Protect the farmland. Protect the water. Protect the Highlands Act before the first cut becomes a thousand.

We can build warehouses anywhere. We cannot build another Highlands.